AprilR's WebLog

PingBack from http://microsoft-sharepoint.simplynetdev.com/impact-vs10-memorial-day-weekend-challenge/

April,

I am not keen on having the help running in a browser, at the very least it should run in a separate program containing a browser, because otherwise it becomes very hard to find where the help is.

I'm concerned about the use of the browser to provide all the help including the table of contents etc., which is what I understand will be happening because it is very difficult to get a decent keyboard interface.

Right now I can't seem to get any context-sensitive help for WPF, I end up at a page which says page not found, e.g: http://msdn.microsoft.com/query/dev10.query?appId=Dev10IDEF1&l=en-US&k=k("SYSTEM.WINDOWS.INPUT.ROUTEDCOMMAND.#CTOR");k(category-".NETFRAMEWORK;V4.0")&rd=true

When I can find my way to a page that I want, I note that there's no way to turn off the display of all the other languages that I don't care about.

Low bandwidth is certainly a lot faster than the old MSDN view, and also has the advantage that you don't have to click in a frame before you can press page down to scroll down.

I would certainly think I will vote A and stick with this for working with MSDN online, but I hope that the help file will have all the things that we've come to expect with Microsoft help, such as table of contents and an excellent index.

As a help authoring tool vendor, I haven't received any information on what the status of help authoring tools is with regard to the help 3 release.

...Stefan